After a week I turned off the food tracker. It had given me a bit of what I wanted – an idea of what I was eating and how I was eating especially as I tried to set anew routine. However I decided that it would be too easy to get obsessed over tracking everything and that wouldn’t be healthy. I’m still going to use the exercise tracker. I think that’s ok to get obsessed over, but not the food.

Anyway we acquired via Trademe an exercycle and I intend to many kilometers on it…

Every now and then I go on mostly useless health kicks where I say I will change stuff and don’t. I don’t believe in the long term effectiveness of diets as they tend only lead to yo-yo weight fluctuations. So having turned 44 and very much aware I’m not as fit and healthy as I should be (also the last time I had my sugars tested they proved to be higher than what is wanted) and so not wanting to develop diabetes I am on another healthy living kick.

The tick is to not diet but to make changes. I want to make meaningful changes but sometimes it’s hard to track them. having recently acquired a newfangled communications device that has a nifty app that helps you keep track of things like steps, food and water intake. And because I know the formula is calories in should be no more than calories out I have decided to start tracking my food and calorie intake/output. It’s not a diet per say more establishing a base line and as I do it I will make changes to what and how I eat to ensure that the formula is trending in the positive health direction.

It does mean I will need to try and figure out the calories on some things but I’m sure I can do this…

Leading up to my 44th birthday I decided to finally get the tattoo I have often times talked about.

Now I don’t deal well with needles or pain and so even though I have wanted a tattoo for the longest time I had never got one. I could have always prioritised the money and time to book a sessions but always put it off. Now was the time though.

Firstly I have always felt the best tattoos suit the person and mean something to the wearer. I have had ideas, and now I have one I may revisit some others, which have resonated with me. What I really wanted was a simple text tattoo with the Star Wars quote “Do or do not, there is no try”.

What does the tattoo mean for me then. Well it is a permanent reminder that I can actually do something that I want to do but that scares me. Also the first line works to tell me that if I want to do something I need to either do it or not do it. That I can set down to do something and if I fail that’s ok. It’s the doing that’s important.

The session itself was quick and will at times painful it was mostly all right. Like a lot of things you build them up in your head to a much larger scale than they need to be.

It’s my birthday next Tuesday and we kind of really love birthdays. So I’m looking forward to it very much.

One of the things we try to do is have leave on each others birthdays so we can just do what we want. This year I’m being especially indulgent and taking the Monday off as well so that I can have a long birthday weekend.

There’s a bonus of a WWE pay-per-view show that I can watch on Monday on the WWE Network if I want. Although this one’s matches are not spinning my wheels so I may give it a pass.

For the birthday I’m planning much eating. For tea we will go to Lone Star so that I can have a big steak not cooked by me. For breakfast I am toying with taking family to a cafe so I can have eggs Benedict. Lunch will be something light at home, maybe a pie. I have to think on whether to cake or not.

One of the aspects of raising a Rainbow family is becoming aware of just how many times the kids have to Out themselves if they want to live openly. It’s also becoming aware of how often they have to, and will have to, make judgement calls as to how safe that coming out is.

Having blithely danced my way through life being a mostly het (I’ve never met a guy I was attracted too but wouldn’t rule it out in some hypothetical world so 95% straight) cis guy I thought the most that LGBTQI+ folks would have to come out would be maybe three or four times (family, friend, work). But I’m now acutely aware how wrong I was.

I wish my kids didn’t have to go through this and have hopes that they will see a time where there is no need to think “will I be safe if I tell people about myself.” Even better would be world where people didn’t have to come out.

This article came across my desk this morning about Steam and Valve and it had me thinking again about the changing nature of ownership and consumption in the digital marketplace. The piece called Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming was an interesting read looking at Valves dodgy tactics with Steam and it’s fight against regulatory regimes that mandate refunds.

With Steam and games you can still purchase games on disc, but the convenience of Steam has captured what could be considered an unhealthy section of the market. You need Steam to play your games.

It had me thinking. With ebooks if we buy via Amazon while you get to own a digital copy you need a Kindle or kindle ap to read it. If you purchase in epub there is much more freedom. Music with Apple is actually freer as you can convert your apple files to mp3 and store them elsewhere. Though with music and the surge in streaming services do people still actually buy digital music? I can understand the resurgence of vinyl as the mode of music ownership.

Also companies can remove things from your libraries. We have a subscription to Audible for audio-books and we bought one that came with a bonus audio-book. I really loved the bonus book but later the rights were removed it was removed from my library. This really sucked. I have thought of re-acquiring the bonus audio-book but feel a little put out that they took our free one away.

Not to mention the fact that now we need digital wills so we can pass ownership of our digital collections to family members.

So yeah i’m thinking again on the what do we own, the nature of consumption and what rights we have in this digital cloud based market.

It’s been a difficult few weeks. We tried very hard to do all the right things and we did like the puppy, but we came to the realisation that we are just not puppy people. So today I took the puppy back to the breeders who were very lovely folks and very understanding.

Naturally the household is a mixture of sadness and relief. I think mostly relief.

They say there are cat people, and dog people, and fish people. We think there must be puppy people as we love dogs but just don’t deal with puppies. We are going to have a break from owning a dog for a while, and if we ever do decide to get another we will be getting an older rehome dog.